The relationship between literature and law: A study of Latin American texts
Abstract
There is a long tradition of interrelationships between Literature and Law. Classical tragedy has provided a forum in Western philosophy for the discussion of political theory. The idea of natural law is developed in Antigone by Sophocles. A similar theme is explored in Jorge Andrade's Pedreira das Almas. Applying Hegel's theory of tragedy, natural law and positive law are seen as antithetical values in the play, which in the end produce a synthesis. Agustin Cuzzani's Una libra de carne approaches the legal question from an expressionistic and Brechtian frame of reference. It presents the trial of an employee who, under financial duress, repeats the pact made in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. El Gigante Amapolas by Juan Bautista Alberdi is a political farce relating to Rousseau' s concept of the social contract. Both literary critics and law professors have evaluated the influence of literary theory on the interpretation of legal texts. Sanford Levinson examines the implications of the running debate among literary theorists about the conditions of shared meaning. However, this dissertation emphasizes the main differences between utterances in Literature and Law by applying the "speech act" theory. Machado de Assis's Memorias Postumas de Bras Cubas illustrates many of these differences. The idea of a contract is applied to the reading of literary texts, as an implicit agreement between the textualized author and the reader. The study of the short story "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote" by Jorge Luis Borges explains the process of the contract.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Merrell, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Latin American literature|Law|Comparative literature
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